The Home Subcommittee on Delivering on Authorities Effectivity held its first ever listening to Wednesday, as Republicans criticized the hovering $36 trillion nationwide debt, in addition to Democrats’ condemnation of Elon Musk’s effort to slash waste.
In her opening assertion, Chairwoman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-S.C., mentioned the committee should be “brutally trustworthy about how this huge debt got here to be within the first place – it got here from Congress and from elected presidential administrations.”
“We as Republicans and Democrats can nonetheless maintain tightly to our beliefs, however we’re going to should let go of funding them as a way to save our sinking ship,” Greene mentioned. “This isn’t a time for political theater and partisan assaults. The American individuals are watching. The legislative department cannot sit on the sidelines. On this subcommittee, we are going to battle the conflict on waste shoulder to shoulder with President Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE workforce.”
Greene mentioned, “enslaving our nation in debt” is without doubt one of the “greatest betrayals in opposition to the American individuals’s personal elected authorities” and vowed that her subcommittee, working below the Home Oversight Committee, would work with President Donald Trump’s newly created Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE), which is spearheaded by Musk as a part of the chief department.
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., talks together with her counsel as she presides over a Home DOGE subcommittee listening to on “The Conflict on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Funds and Fraud,” on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025. (AP Picture/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
“The federal authorities, authorities workers, and unelected bureaucrats don’t stay by the identical guidelines as the good American individuals and personal companies,” Greene mentioned. “The federal authorities’s earnings is the American individuals’s hard-earned tax {dollars}. Their literal blood, sweat and tears and taxes are collected by regulation at gunpoint. Do not pay your taxes and also you go to jail. The federal authorities doesn’t have to supply glorious customer support to earn its earnings. It takes your cash whether or not you prefer it or not. And federal workers obtain their paycheck it doesn’t matter what.”
The subcommittee’s highest rating Democrat, Rep. Melanie Stanbury of New Mexico, used her opening assertion to slam Trump and Musk’s efforts, regardless of agreeing to a bipartisan method to “digging into the greater than $236 billion in improper funds that we see going out the door each single yr,” in addition to “placing into place rigorous oversight and controls to stop fraud and abuse, and, after all, to go after unhealthy actors.”
“We will not simply sit right here right now and faux like every part is regular and that that is simply one other listening to on authorities effectivity,” Stanbury mentioned. “As a result of whereas we’re sitting right here, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are recklessly and illegally dismantling the federal authorities, shuttering federal companies, firing federal employees, withholding funds very important to the protection and well-being of our communities, and hacking our delicate knowledge methods.”
One of many witnesses, Stewart Whitson of the Basis for Authorities Accountability, testified that DOGE’s efforts have uncovered $59 million paid to luxurious inns in New York Metropolis to accommodate unlawful immigrants, $1.5 million to advance range, fairness and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces, $32,000 for a transgender comedian e book in Peru, $10 million value of meals help funneled to al-Qaeda and “the listing goes on.”
“However slightly than applauding the work of DOGE, the left has launched a coordinated marketing campaign to attempt to demonize Mr. Musk with the hope of shifting focus away from the disastrous waste, fraud and abuse that occurred on Biden’s watch. However guess what? It isn’t working,” Whitson mentioned.
Former FBI Particular Agent Senior Director of Federal Affairs Basis for Authorities Accountability Stewart Whitson seems earlier than a Home DOGE subcommittee listening to on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (AP Picture/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
He shifted to the main target of Wednesday’s subcommittee listening to, Medicaid waste and fraud, testifying that greater than 80% of improper Medicaid funds are as a consequence of eligibility errors, which Congress should deal with. Whitson testified that one in 5 {dollars} spent on Medicaid is improper, and Medicaid fraud and mismanagement is on observe to price U.S. taxpayers $1 trillion within the subsequent 10 years.
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Whitson additionally supplied Congress 3 ways to help Trump’s DOGE effort. The primary is for Congress to strengthen the Medicaid program by means of legislative motion. He testified that each the Biden and Obama administrations issued guidelines and steering that made it tougher for states to confirm eligibility for Medicaid. He mentioned repealing Biden’s Medicaid streamlining rule, which restricts eligibility verification that states can carry out, would save $164 billion over 10 years.
In a later trade, Whitson mentioned the Biden-era rule prohibits states from verifying eligibility greater than every year and prohibits in-person or cellphone name interviews to confirm the recipient’s identification.
It additionally opens “prolonged reconsideration durations,” opening the door for unlawful immigrants to obtain advantages.
“A state has to attend not less than 90 days” earlier than verifying whether or not a recipient is an unlawful immigrant, Whitson mentioned. “And truly what we’re seeing is it is let some states to attend so long as 13 years.”
Elon Musk, left, speaks as President Donald Trump seems on within the Oval Workplace of the White Home in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 11, 2025. (JIM WATSON/AFP by way of Getty Photographs)
Secondly, Whitson mentioned Congress may assist DOGE by “making certain that entrenched partisan bureaucrats do not stand in the way in which of reform.” To try this, Congress should codify the president’s authority “to fireplace unproductive or insubordinate company workers as wanted,” in addition to grant the president authority to completely remove vacant positions and consolidate nonessential positions throughout companies and departments to assist promote effectivity, Whitson mentioned.
“Personnel is coverage, and with out competent workers to faithfully execute the president’s agenda, the DOGE challenge will fail,” he mentioned.
Thirdly, Whitson known as on Congress to cross the REINS Act to “make President Trump’s DOGE cost-cutting and de-regulatory reforms everlasting.”
“There’s just one large drawback with the DOGE effort. Most of its work might be undone by a future president with the stroke of a pen,” he mentioned, including that the REINS Act would “return Article One budgetary energy of the purse to Congress whereas selling deregulation. It could additionally assist lock within the DOGE reforms and cement President Trump’s legacy as essentially the most consequential de-regulatory and cost-cutting president in U.S. historical past.”
At one other level within the listening to, Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., performed out archived video of former President Invoice Clinton in 1997 and former President Barack Obama in 2011 pledging to cut back the federal workforce and shut a whole bunch of presidency workplaces exterior of Washington. Obama spoke in 2011 of his administration’s “Marketing campaign to Reduce Waste,” saying on the time, “We thought that it was totally applicable for our governments and our companies to attempt to root out waste, giant and small, in a scientific means.” From the Oval Workplace, Obama added that “numerous the motion is in Congress and legislative, however within the meantime, we needn’t look ahead to Congress as a way to, do one thing about wasteful spending that is on the market.”
Burlison mentioned the video was meant to “remind my Democratic mates at some extent during which you as soon as had the vast majority of the American individuals in your facet.”
